Volume 22, numéro 1, 2024 Pleasures of Surveillance

EN :

In this article, I examine some of the dangers that are associated with sex toys known as teledildonics. Unlike more conventional sex toys, teledildonics connect to the internet and allow their users and others to control these devices remotely and often through a Bluetooth connection. While teledildonics introduce new ways of engaging and experiencing sexual pleasure, they do so by risking the personal and sensitive data that such devices transmit and collect from their users. Moreover, I consider the risk that teledildonics pose as connected technologies that can be hacked and controlled, scrutinizing what this means in terms of consent and sexual assault in intimate relationships and on a live adult webcam platform like Chaturbate. I investigate how current legal definitions of consent and sexual assault neglect online sex workers, and especially those who work within a tip and token system like Chaturbate, and question how legal protections can be enforced amidst the jurisdictional and territorial problems that plague cyberspace more broadly. With these lack of protections in place, I build on scholarly research that identifies some of the risks that are associated with teledildonics as technologies of potential sexual assault (Nixon 2018; Sparrow and Karas 2020; Arrell 2022). In specific, I study how Canadian laws are ill-equipped to address the more obscure nature of consent and sexual assault as they pertain to Chaturbate and Lovense devices, a leading teledildonics company.

EN :

In this article, I consider two indie videogames, You Must Be 18 or Older to Enter (Seemingly Pointless 2017) and how do you Do It? (Freeman et al. 2014), that share an interest in the affective impact of parental surveillance and discipline on childhood sexual exploration. Using close playing as my method, I argue that the videogames reveal the perils of surveillance and its pleasures. Drawing on assemblage theory, I demonstrate the contingency of videogames’ affective impact on players and the world and the—sometimes contradictory—potentials that surveillance produces as part of a sexual assemblage. Sometimes, using surveillance as a game mechanic amplifies sexual affect and pleasure and can thus be conceptualized as an example of “flirting” with surveillance. At other times, players orient themselves toward the videogames as the archetypical “parent”—finding pleasure in “catching” a videogame about sexual exploration and attempting to discipline it. Finally, drawing on Kathryn Bond Stockton (2004, 2009, 2017) and José Esteban Muñoz (2019), I argue that, by allowing players to relive childhood sexual exploration as adults, You Must Be 18 or Older to Enter and how do you Do It? provide players with the opportunity to become a playful child, to loop back through time and re-explore sexual discovery, and thus shape nuanced critiques of the way surveillance shapes sexual possibilities.

EN :

This study investigates how men who have sex with men (MSM) discern, discuss, and defy issues of surveillance in the context of casual, public sex—also known as cruising—and how these exchanges constitute and inform subaltern counter-surveillance measures. Focusing on written exchanges by users of the queer hook-up website Squirt, I analyze how individuals share information about the safety and surveillance of cruising locations in the Greater Ottawa Area. This work concludes that surveillance and cruising is normalized, and that both police and ordinary citizens present safety risks. Because of this, great care is taken to act discreetly and not infringe on the safety of non-cruisers. Finally, environmental factors contribute greatly to both the construction and circumvention of surveillance infrastructure. The data additionally complicate surveillance realism (Dencik and Cable 2017), since cruisers accept the presence of surveillance but not the inevitable impact of it.

EN :

When conceptualizing the call for this special issue, one artist came to our (Julia and Stéfy’s) minds: Dani Lessnau. Her work straddles complexities of surveillance, voyeurism, desire, and female pleasure. In particular, we want to highlight Lessnau’s provocative performance photography series extimité created in 2017. Using a pinhole camera inserted into her vagina, she photographs the sexual intimacies and relationships with her partners. We ask more broadly, what does it mean to use surveillance as a method of pleasure? And, how can artists subvert or appropriate the surveillant gaze in ways that disrupt heteropatriarchy? We are grateful to have had the opportunity to explore these tensions and questions with the artist herself in this interview. Thank you, Dani, for engaging with us in this topic.